Don't hold back or edit because you think it’s too graphic. Bring on the bad!

On Friday, if you read an entry, please comment even if it’s horrible (be nice…not Bad in your comments). And I encourage all participants to try to read everyone else’s entry over the weekend if you can.

If you don’t have a post I can delete your entry if you want me to. But I encourage you to at least write an entry about some woman you don’t like much and how she’s ruined your life. Everyone has one of those. :)

NOTE: I have closed the list to sign-ups and deleted all links that do not lead to a blogfest entry. If I inadvertently deleted a good link, add a comment here with your name and URL and I will add it back.

Now I pontificate on “What Makes a Girl Bad?”

So what makes a girl go bad? It could be any number of things. Growing up in a broken home. Suffering abuse. The strife of poverty. Or it could be some kind of trauma later in life. Many Bad Girls come from good homes and are college educated. Some are highly skilled professionals. What turns them to a life of baditude? Maybe they lack a sense of morality or a conscience. Maybe they can’t deal with pent-up anger. Maybe they need to avenge events from their past. Maybe they chafe from living in a male-dominated world and seek to settle the score. Who knows? All we know is that they’re Bad.

But there is one thing all Bad Girls have in common. They get what they want, and they don’t care who they have to hurt to get it. They don’t adhere to society’s mores. Rules don’t apply to them. They are passionate and emotional, even if they don’t dare show it. Their feelings are not to be taken lightly. To cross a Bad Girl is to invite your own death. But I also think there’s something deeper, some primitive need that a Bad Girl has unfulfilled, and if you can satisfy that need, you can turn a Bad Girl into a woman more awesome than any Good Girl could ever hope to be. It’s a fine line that few can successfully navigate, so would-be Heroes beware.

So why do we love to read and write so much about these castoffs from normal society, these strange women who live in the shadows of our culture, the people no one wants to talk about (except they always do)? Why do we turn them into our Heroines and Villainesses? I think it’s because these Bad Girls can do what we cannot—eschew the “normal” rules that guide us and pretty much do whatever they want and damn the consequences. (I was determined to get “eschew” into this post). We live through their exploits, and fantasize about having even a piece of their freedom and ferocity.

So All Hail the Bad Girls! See you all back here on Friday!

(Except for my Primal Scream Blogfest post on Wednesday…which involves a female character who is not in any way a Bad Girl unfortunately).

9 comments:

Yay! I'm looking forward to the blogfest. I think I know which bad girl I'm going to use even, not that I have much to choose from. Might want to start having more female characters show up in my stories.

Thanks for the added information on bad girls. I'll keep that in mind when writing.;-)

I've got a bad girl in my second novel, but I've got a really bad girl in my screenplay. Can I post a scene from the screenplay? She's got a seriously dirty mouth and half of everything she says is profanities or insults. Anyway, just wanted to check and see if your blogfest rules confined the scenes to novels or if screenplays are fair game, too?